With well over 200 million registered users, Facebook is undeniably a giant on the web, and one that is sitting on an enormous amount of raw data about individuals and demographically selected groups at that. While private profiles are not even always as private as we’d like to assume – something we’ve learned yesterday and multiple times in the past as well – there’s a lot of data that you can extract from what’s openly available to the public.
For example: what are the most common names used on the social network?
Well that’s exactly what social search solutions provider Rapleaf wanted to find out, so they crawled no less than 100 million public Facebook profiles for unique names and compiled three lists: most common first names, last names and combinations of both.
There are little surprises to be found in the lists. Over 1 million of scanned profiles has ‘John’ as first name, making it the most popular on Facebook, although chances are ‘Michael’ should come out on top if ‘Mike’ as a nickname wouldn’t be counted as unique. Out of the ten most common first names, only number 10 is female (Maria), although ‘Chris’ could account for men or women alike. The top 10:
First Name Count
1. John 1,037,972
2. David 966,439
3. Michael 798,212
4. Chris 647,966
5. Mike 535,065
6. Mark 526,198
7. Paul 511,504
8. Daniel 504,203
9. James 494,945
10. Maria 484,693
The last names list is more representative of Facebook’s global reach than the list above, and is led by another American household name: Smith. Surnames like ‘Lee’ are popular worldwide, and the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10 are all outspoken Hispanic names that are very common throughout the whole of Latin-America and Spain. Top ten:
Last Name Count
1. Smith 1,049,158
2. Jones 520,943
3. Johnson 440,978
4. Lee 392,709
5. Brown 375,444
6. Williams 372,486
7. Rodriguez 328,984
8. Garcia 311,477
9. Gonzalez 277,987
10. Lopez 269,896
The list of top 10 full names commonly used on Facebook is believed to be comprised of both real and fake accounts, considering the fact both ‘John Smith’ and ‘Jane Smith’ made it on there. Again, little surprises in the top 10:
Full Name Count
1. John Smith 75,980
2. Joe Smith 14,648
3. Bob Smith 13,846
4. Mike Smith 11,199
5. Juan Carlos 10,254
6. Jane Smith 10,023
7. Mike Jones 10,014
8. David Smith 9,322
9. Sarah Smith 8,534
10. James Smith 8,397
Rapleaf offers the top 100 lists as CSV download, but we’ve made it easier for you to consult them by creating separate pages with the full lists:
Top 100 Most Common First Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Last Names On Facebook
Top 100 Most Common Full Names On Facebook
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